The GENES Blog (GEnealogy News and EventS): Top stories concerning ancestral research in Britain, Ireland, and their diasporas, from Irish born Scottish based professional family historian, author and tutor Chris Paton. Feel free to quote from this blog, but please credit The GENES Blog if you do so. To contact me please email chrismpaton @ outlook.com.

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Wednesday, 18 January 2012

Roman Catholic records in ScotlandsPeople Centre soon

The Scottish Roman Catholic records currently available for access on the ScotlandsPeople website (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk) will soon be available for consultation within the ScotlandsPeople Centre (www.scotlandspeoplehub.gov.uk) - I've been told provisionally that they should be there by the end of January. I am unclear, however, if the online closure periods restricting access to BMDs by 100, 75 and 50 years respectively, that are observed by the website, will also be observed in the centre (it is not the case with the statutory records, which are accessible to the present day in the centre, but not online).

Note that the Catholic records online also include records from across the United Kingdom and British overseas military bases, via the Bishopric of the Forces Collection, which the Scottish Catholic Archives holds on behalf of the bishopric based in Aldershot.

Having attended the centre yesterday for the first time in a fair few weeks (I've been busy on other fronts!), a huge thumbs up to the ScotlandsPeople team for providing access to the digitised records of the National Records of Scotland on terminals within the SP Centre search rooms - it made a hell of a difference to the research I did yesterday.

On the down side, a big thumbs down to the cafe, which sells soup (no grumbles there, nice soup, healthy portion!) but then tells you it has no spoons to allow you to eat it with, only teaspoons.